Whitley Strieber - The Grays

He put his hand on the phone. There was nobody else in the world who could make this decision, or even offer advice. If he was wrong, there was just no way to tell what the grays would do.

Could he bring about the end of the world when he picked up that phone?

He lifted the receiver, punched in some numbers. “Jimmy, Rob. Do you have my glowboy coordinates?”

“Yes, sir. It’s been ground bound for a while, sir.”

“I need a scramble out of Alfred moving on it instamente.”

“Yes, sir!”

He paused, then. Took a deep breath. “God be with us,” he said into the phone. His next step was to inform Wilkes of what was happening, and that required setting up a listening device on the call. Mr. Crew expected all contacts with Wilkes to be logged, recorded, and sent to him.

Personally, Rob was convinced that Crew was right to be suspicious of Wilkes. He believed that the man was using the empaths to discover new technologies, and selling them to the private sector. Also, Wilkes’s pathological hatred of the grays was inappropriate. He believed that they were bent on invasion. They scared him and that’s why he hated them. But hate does not win wars, knowledge does, and that’s what Wilkes’s empath unit was supposed to be gaining from the one remaining gray in captivity. But damned little useful information came out of the new empath.

Rob did not understand the grays but he didn’t hate them. In fact, he found them incredibly interesting. They’d been here for fifty years and they hadn’t invaded yet, so that didn’t seem to be a very real concern. What they did to people was weird, but you didn’t see folks disappearing or being injured, at least not physically. Obviously, though, whatever the grays were doing to the people they abducted was damned important to them. Otherwise, there would not be threats. They were taking something from us, no question of that, but in the way a farmer takes milk, not meat.

The information flow, Rob believed, was being shunted to Wilkes’s real buddies, the quiet companies who fed off the United States’ one-hundred-and-twenty-billion-dollar annual black budget. In Rob’s opinion, there was a pipeline that led, through Wilkes, from Adam right back to the industry. It would certainly explain why an Oklahoma orphan boy, who had nothing to live on but his soldier’s pay, called a multimillion-dollar house in Georgetown home… and why an officer whose work was in a hole two hundred feet below Indianapolis, Indiana, even needed a presence inside the Beltway.

“Mike, it’s Rob. Sorry about the late hour, but I have a situation. There’s a glowboy on the ground near Wilton, Kentucky. I know, it’s very odd and very disturbing. What’s even more of a concern is that there are civilians in the field around him. He’s got his plasma deployed and he’s ready to run, but he ain’t running. There have gotta be video cameras down there, all kinds of trouble. I’m doing a scramble, I’ve got to get that guy out of there. Do you think you could get Glass in the hole with Adam? Let’s reassure him that it’s just a friendly warning that they might spill their own secret. And let’s please find out what we can about what in sam hill they’re up to.”

He waited until he heard Wilkes’s grunt of assent. The good colonel did not like to be dictated to, which is why Rob did just that whenever he had a chance.

ALFRED AIR FORCE BASE WAS a training facility. It was still up and running largely because Kentucky’s senior senator was a member of the Armed Services Committee and powerful enough to hold onto his bases.

Whatever, Rob was damned relieved that the place was still operational. He widened the image on the overhead satellite, punched a couple of keys, and saw a white outline of the base superimposed over its location. The base was barely thirty miles from the unfolding incident.

IN THE FIELD IN KENTUCKY, they were standing in helpless amazement, watching the object. Nancy Jeffers had gone home, because she and her husband had no wish to leave their baby alone with something like this taking place. Katelyn and Conner were also gone, and Dan was just as glad. A child had no business out here, and he thought that Kelton was letting his boys get way too close with that camera of theirs.

Without warning, a clap of thunder hit. Dan cried out, they all did. Chris Jeffers covered his head with his hands. Dan saw a double star wheeling in the sky. Then he heard the shriek of a jet and realized that what he was looking at were afterburners. “It’s the Air Force!” he shouted.

Its underside glowing in the light being given off by the object, the fighter howled past so low that a hot stench of burning jet fuel washed over them.

The object turned purple. It moved, wobbling, above the ground.

The voice in the thing cried out, “Help me, help me, oh God, no! NO NO NO!”

The light rose into the sky. It hung there, still wobbling slightly. The jet’s glowing afterburners turned and started back.

“Stop it! Stop that!” came the voice. Then more screaming. “Ah! Ah! Ah! Oh aaaaaa…”

Maggie Warner screamed with her, crying into the agony of it.

In that instant, the object rose a hundred feet or so, then shot off to the north literally like a bullet. It went faster than Dan had ever seen anything go.

The jet passed over again, its engines screaming. It turned and followed the object. They watched the afterburners creep away into the sky.

Into the silence that followed, Chris said, “God help her.”

“That was a UFO,” young Jimbo Kelton announced.

Maggie asked, “Was that a UFO?”

“Dear heaven,” Harley Warner said, “I think so.”

Dan was looking at a small shadow in the field standing where the glow had been. “Folks,” he said, “uh, I don’t think we’re alone here.”

But when he shone his flashlight toward it, there was nothing there.

LAUREN GLASS WAS ENJOYING TEDDY Blaine’s lovemaking, powerful and persistent from this sweet, rough guy. As a fellow Air Force officer, he was carefully disinterested in Lauren’s classified work, and that made this particular affair very fun and very easy. As long as she was involved in heavily classified work, Lauren’s plan was to keep the lovers moving through her life. Nobody deep, because it made it too hard to keep her secrets.

When Colonel Wilkes called her, she tried to ignore it. She pushed the chiming out of her mind, concentrated on the warmth under the covers, and the fabulous young man who was loving her.

The warble became a whine.

“Oh, Lauren,” Teddy whispered, sinking down onto her, burying his face in her neck, kissing her now gently, pressing his prickled cheek against her soft one.

“My love,” she said, and thought that she really did kind of mean it. Which meant—should she ditch him on the never-get-too-close theory?

The whine became a wail.

He jerked like he’d been stuck with a pin. “I don’t believe this.”

“My cert’s up,” she said, referring to the security certification system on her computer, which started automatically when she began receiving a classified message.

But why was he after her now, at—what—jeez, it was 3 A.M. She’d been in the cage for six hours yesterday waiting without result for Adam to at least take a breath, and she was most certainly not ready to return to his dark, claustrophobic hole.

Throwing off the covers, she went over and typed her password. Code came up, four lines, which she sight read. “They’ve got a virus,” she muttered, striving not to reveal to him her true horror. The message communicated extreme urgency. Something was wrong. Real wrong.

“Let somebody else fix it.”